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Edge Of Glory (Part 1)

11/27/2012 9:21:57 AM

Everyone knows you don’t look to desktop publishing software for web design. But now the original DTP company is offering new tools and services that just might help to create a beautiful, modern web

WEB DESIGN IS rapidly evolving, and that present ever-changing challenges to those immersed in it, including designers, developers and the software companies that serve them. Plain text and still images are no longer enough, but Adobe’s Flash, once the tool of choice for adding animation and interaction, has been marginalized in favour of defined and de facto web standards such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript; but where Flash came with its own visually led authoring environment, these remain largely the preserve of coders.

Adobe Flash Professional CS6

Mobile is overtaking desktop as the primary screen to cater for, but testing and debussing across multiple devices is time consuming and demoralizing. Online typography has been boosted by accessible web font services, but design apps rely on locally installed fonts and set type that the web can’t deliver. Coding tools make no sense to graphic designers; layout tools imagine we’re living in a world where web pages still echo static print layouts; and dynamic visual web design apps produce code that developers laugh at. How can any of this be resolved?

Adobe is working on some answers, and this month we saw the first full release of Edge, a suite of products and services that brings some new approaches to web design not as a company with its roots in DTP might wishfully imagine it, but as it’s actually practiced in 2012. Some elements were incomplete at the time of going to press, but we were able to take a close look at the suite and ask some leading web designers and developers what they think of it.

Description: Web design is rapidly evolving, and that present ever-changing challenges to those immersed in it

Web design is rapidly evolving, and that present ever-changing challenges to those immersed in it

ADOBE HAS LONG been accused of failing to ‘get’ the web. It’s dominated digital design for print ever since the Mac first made it practical in the 1980s, but the company’s attempts to move into online design have been mired in old-fashioned or simply misguided methodologies. While its Dreamweaver app seemed for a while to promise a workable fusion of visual design and coding, it never quite achieved the relevance it strove for although Dreamweaver CS6, released earlier this year, did make tentative steps towards responsive web design, enabling developers to create sites that would respond to predefined viewport sizes (such as a desktop browser, an iPad screen or an iPhone display).

The arrival of Edge, however, will radically change the way Adobe is talked about in the web community. The seven-product suite, says web product designer Faruk Ates (farukat.es), is ‘the actualization of Adobe’s shift away from Flash and towards open web technologies’ that was first hinted at by the company’s 2011 acquisitions of web font subscription service Typekit and mobile development framework PhoneGap. He and others are already impressed and optimistic about Adobe’s future in web design.

Speaking to MacUser, Adobe UK’s web product manager, John Cole, agreed that the web platform has ‘changed almost beyond recognition’ during the past decade, ‘delivering experiences that are richer, more interactive and more engaging than before’. But even though it’s a response to that discontinuity, he places Edge in the context of Adobe’s ‘long heritage in developing technologies that allow creative professionals to create expressive content’.

Although Cole reckons legacy tools ‘still have their place, have been fundamental in creating the online experiences we enjoy today and will continue to be important in the future’, he accepts that a modern web ‘requires investment in new tools if it is to evolve further and meet the needs of future generations’. Hence Edge, Adobe’s solution for providing web designers and developers with ‘everything they need to create beautiful mobile-ready content and apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript’.

BROADLY SPEAKING, THE seven tools in the Edge line-up can be split between design and coding. (Naturally, this being all about the web, there’s some crossover.) For front-end designers, Edge Web Fonts, Typekit, Edge Animate and Edge Reflow will be the ones to watch.

To get the least complex of these out of the way, Edge Web Fonts effortlessly expands the typefaces available to web designers beyond the handful of so called ‘web safe’ fonts (Arial, Georgia, Verdana and so on) that the industry relied on for years. It makes free web fonts contributed by Adobe, Google and designers worldwide available in any site, served by Typekit, the online service that also offers commercial fonts.

‘The Edge Web Fonts service is very promising and appealing to get a project started quickly with rich, engaging type,’ reckons designer Ates, adding that the integration with the entire Edge suite will be a boon to designers who until now have often been lumbered with approximating online fonts using locally installed equivalents.

Web developer Todd Motto (toddmotto.com) also enthused to MacUser about Edge Web Fonts, noting particularly that they would be ‘really easy to implement’ although he questioned Adobe’s reliance on JavaScript to load the fonts.

The same positives and negatives turned out to recur when we quizzed designers and developers about the whole Edge suite. Most are intrigued by the possibilities and time-saving potential of the tools, but remain concerned about its code output.

Edge Animate

As its name suggests and Cole explains, Edge Animate enables you to ‘animate HTML elements such as text, images (including SVG) and more, by modifying their visual properties in conjunction with the timeline’. In other words, it’s a slightly dumbed-down Flash successor based on web standards, which work on mobile devices, rather than the proprietary Flash plug-in, which, after some aborted efforts, doesn’t.

Description: With Edge Animate, you can create interactive animations using HTML, CSS and JavaScript

With Edge Animate, you can create interactive animations using HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Developer Paul Mist (mistermist.co.uk) wryly notes that Edge Animate is clearly geared towards Flash designers who ‘want to move with the times and wouldn’t mind iPad users finally sharing their experiences’. Flash developer Iain Lobb (iainlobb.com) calls it a ‘great idea’, pointing out that ‘to do good work, animators need a tool with a timeline, and this brings that paradigm to web standards technologies.’

Mist agree that Edge Animate may find favour with developers not keen on ‘the cumbersome task of hand-coding sequences in a non-visual manner’, but again worries about ‘what kind of code you’ll end up with’. If this seems an esoteric consideration, keep in mind that Adobe’s Flash creation tools only ever had to generate code in a language invented by Adobe for delivery by software (in the form of plug-ins) created by Adobe. Edge Animate has to generate code that complies with independently defined web standards so that a variety of third-party web browsers will display it predictably. Designers, therefore, need to be reassured that the code it outputs will work as expected and without infelicities or inefficiencies.

Adobe’s Cole told us Edge Animate output had been ‘tested to perform well on a range of desktop browsers’ along with iOS and ‘most Android devices’. The app’s ‘stage’ itself uses WebKit, the guts of the Safari and Chrome web browsers, which Cole says is beneficial in enabling you to design using the same surface that many people will view the content on a step towards the often cited goal of developing in the browser.

That doesn’t mean the app is WebKit specific in its output, however. Firefox and Internet Explorer users are covered too, and Cole notes that Edge Animate provides a ‘down-level stage to create fallback versions of projects’ for older, less capable versions of Microsoft’s browser.

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